Ecological restoration:Our hope for the future?

Abstract

Ecological restoration is widely employed from tens to millions of hectares in space, and from tens of days to thousands of years in time, which forces consideration of it thoroughly. We argue that three questions are the most important among the contents relevant of ecological restoration, including why, what and how to restore degraded systems. Why to restore determines whether or not the degraded ecological systems should be restored. What to restore is the goal of ecological restoration. The explicit goal of ecological restoration is necessary to guide ecological restoration workers in pursuit of excellence and prevent restoration from being swamped by purely technological activities. And how to restore means the methods and steps we should apply. To ensure the final success of ecological restoration, restored sites should be monitored and managed for long time to determine whether the selected methods are appropriate, and can be remedy better. Only to deal with these effectively, ecological restoration would be the hope for the future.